Water for Elephants: A Novel | Sara Gruen

Water for Elephants: A Novel | Sara Gruen | Run away to the circus....read this book!

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Water for Elephant...

	Water for Elephants: A Novel Sara Gruen Algonquin Books, 2007 - 350 pages average customer review:based on 1547 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A great read

This is a great book to get lost in. The characters are well developed and you can see the story the author is tells about life during the great depression working in a circus. It's about people who are down on their luck that come together to help others and the animals. It's one of those rare books when your lucky enough to find one that's hard to put down. Great fiction with a historical basis that lends credibility.

Run away to the circus....read this book!

Truth be told, I was not interested in reading Water for Elephants. The subject matter, a memoir of a 93 year old former circus veterinarian, was not interesting to me. But this book got such rave reviews on Amazon that I decided to pick it up. And am I glad I did! The book grabbed me from the first chapter. The author gives life to some very interesting characters and the reader gets a true behind the scenes look at the citizens who made up a circus during the depression. The narrator of the story is Jacob, who runs away to join the circus after his charmed life takes a tragic turn. He gets a real life education. So did I while reading this book. I shed a few tears too. I could not put it down, and didn't want it to end. I will highly recommend this book, and I'm so glad I read it!

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A Love Affair: Rosie, Marlena and Jacob

"Water for Elephants" is another of those novels that I somehow managed to miss reading when it was at its peak of popularity, this time by well over two years. But I'm here to tell you that, in the case of Water for Elephants, it is definitely better late than never.

Even in Depression-era America, Jacob Jankowski is doing pretty well for himself. He is a Cornell-trained veterinarian who only needs to sit for his final exams to make it official. He thinks he is in love but his lack of experience with the ladies means that he is more likely to be in lust than in love. For him, life is still pretty good.

But things change sometimes when one least expects it, and for Jacob change comes in the form of a tragic traffic accident that claims the lives of both his parents. As bad as that is, it gets even worse when he learns that he has also been left destitute because his parents mortgaged everything to pay his Cornell tuition, and Jacob finds that he cannot sit still even long enough to finish his exams. Wanting to get away from it all, he hops the first freight train that comes along, avoids getting thrown back onto the tracks, and soon enough finds himself a member of Benzini Brothers traveling circus.

Sara Gruen lets Jacob tell his own story by alternating the first person narrative of ninety-something-year-old Jacob, now living in a nursing home, with the voice of twenty-three-year-old Jacob as he experiences his summer with the Benzini Brothers. And what a story it is because the Benzini Brothers circus is not exactly The Ringling Brothers show and only circus owner, Uncle Al, tries to pretend that it is. Everything about the Benzini Brothers is second rate: the ragged animals in the zoo's menagerie are badly treated and lucky to eat once a day, the roustabouts and other workers are not paid consistently, the freaks are usually fakes or not all that freakish in the first place, and the girly show performer has been known to take paying customers after show hours.

Jacob manages to catch on permanently with the show even with his incomplete veterinarian credentials and all goes relatively well until he falls in love with two ladies: Rosie, the elephant who joins the circus after he does, and Marlena, the beautiful young equestrian performer unfortunately married to the sadistic August, a man who beats both Marlena and Rosie.

Gruen paints an unforgettable picture of life in a small-time Depression-era circus, an environment filled with filth, underfed animals and humans, cruelty, alcohol abuse, varying degrees of crime, lust, and callousness. Jacob, appalled at what he sees and what he learns about August, Marlena and Uncle Al, fights to maintain his sense of decency in a world he never knew existed, but his love for a married woman and his guilt at not doing more to defend Rosie from the beatings she suffers at the hands of August has him doubting himself.

Surprisingly, as intriguing as the young Jacob's story is, the nursing home predicament that the older Jacob finds himself in is an equally touching one. The audio version of "Water for Elephants" (10 CDs and 11 ½ hours long) is read by David LeDoux, as the young Jacob Jankowski and John Randolph Jones, who turns in an absolutely brilliant performance as Jacob, the old man. Frankly, both of the worlds created by Gruen are somewhat horrifying and both will linger in my memory for a long time.

"Water for Elephants" is, however, a tiny bit blemished by its unlikely ending even though it is the kind of fairy tale ending that I personally would have wished for Mr. Jankowski. Some things, though, are just too good to be true - or to ring true in a novel even as good as this one.

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Worthwhile read!

Slow to the start - I didn't love it right away, but keep reading. A few chapters in I couldn't put it down. The research and writing are so well done you actually feel like you are under the big top! Would definitely recommend it!

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

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